1. Technical Field
The invention relates to sending and receiving electronic mail across the Internet. More particularly, the invention relates to the detecting and challenging of unsolicited electronic mail across the Internet.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The use of electronic mail (email) has proliferated across the world at an incredible rate. Email has become an integral part of people's everyday corporate and personal lives. People communicate via email across continents, towns, streets, and cubicles with friends, family, co-workers, and businesses.
Email is much quicker and convenient to send than a conventional letter. Email users send and receive many emails during any particular day.
However, as with every technological innovation that has been introduced to the masses, there are abusers of email. Commercial enterprises have made a business of creating commercially questionable uses of email. One of the most common commercial abuses of email is sending a mass number of emails to random email addresses. This accomplishes the same effect as junk mail. Users are deluged with unsolicited junk email, otherwise called “spam”. The producers of spam are not selective in the type of email users that the spam is sent to; both young and old, male and female are spammed.
A major producer of spam is the online pornography industry which sends out huge amounts of spam to unsuspecting email users on a daily basis. Children, as well as adults are receiving this type of unwanted email.
Email users are becoming increasingly frustrated with the high volume and frequency of spam. Some users log onto into their email accounts to find that their mailbox is full of spam with no room left for personal email. Spam wastes users' time and reduces productivity.
Referring to FIG. 1, some email service providers 101 such as Yahoo, Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., have reacted to their user's complaints and allow users to specify email addresses and domain names that they do not want to receive email from in a junk emailer list 106. Email destined for a particular user 102 is received by the email service provider 101. The email service provider 101 looks at each email massage's sender field and determines if the email originated from a junk emailer 103 listed on the user's junk emailer list 106. Any such email is stored in the user's bulk mailbox 105 while other emails are saved in the user's normal mailbox 105.
This approach is effective for the email addresses and domain names that the user lists, but requires that a user be proactive and enter the unwanted email addresses and domain names into the junk emailer list Another drawback is that the user must subscribe to the email provider's service.
It would be advantageous to provide an authorized email control system that provides automatic filtering and challenging of unauthorized senders of email to a user. It would further be advantageous to provide an authorized email control system that integrates into an email server architecture as well as a client system.